Books I read in 2024

My reads this year were mostly inspired by recommendations I picked up while listening to the podcasts Red Scare and Caribbean Rhythms (by Bronze Age Pervert).

There are 3 Frenchmen, 2 German, 1 Austrian, 1 Swiss (writing on the Italian Renaissance), 1 Polish-Swiss, 1 Japanese, and 1 American. There are 2 women. I barely cleared 10 books this year.

The book I least enjoyed reading was The Piano Teacher, which I found a little melodramatic and wishy-washy in that postmodernist kind of way, but which I remembered liking a lot when I read it for the first time in university. The books I enjoyed reading the most were probably those by all the French authors (Houellebecq, Stendhal, and Céline). But then again, that might be because all of their books happened to be novels? And maybe I just like novels and should just read more novels? (Aside from the 4 listed above and The Woman in the Dunes, the other 6 books in this pile are all non-fiction in the mixed genres of psychology/art history/philosophy/a compilation of blog posts lol)

There were two books I started and gave up on this year: My First Book by Honor Levy (awful) and The Republic by Plato (boring, hard to follow).

In 2025, I would like to learn French.